Vikramaditya Motwane Says Entourage Costs in Bollywood Have Gone 'Out of Control': 'The Actors Need To Take Responsibility'

For years, conversations about rising film budgets have circled around VFX, star salaries and marketing expenditure. But inside the industry, another cost has grown into a beast of its own — entourages. Filmmaker Vikramaditya Motwane says film recoveries have taken a hit as entourage costs have ballooned beyond proportion.

Many in the industry have been vocal about the entourage culture of Bollywood, which includes travelling gyms, multiple vanity vans, personal chefs and expansive assistant teams- all burdening a production.

“It’s out of control,” Vikramaditya Motwane said during THR India's Producers Roundtable 2025. “The entourages get bigger when you’re promoting a film. It’s just unnecessarily bloating the cost and that’s why recoveries don’t happen the way they should," he added.

Motwane’s frustration comes more from the growing dependency on stars and less from the fear of losing them. “You feel you need the star, so you end up doing whatever they ask,” he says.

The larger question, he believes, is whether filmmakers and producers are willing to take the creative and financial risk of building films without relying on one or two marquee names. “There has to be some amount of responsibility from actors, but also the courage to make something without the guarantee of a star,” he says. 

Joining him for the roundtable was actor-producer Rana Daggubati, who recalled how the Telugu industry handled a similar crisis. “It was getting out of hand. We didn’t shoot for about a month and a half,” ” Daggubati said recalling the industry-wide strike.

What followed were intense meetings between actors and producers that led to clearly defined caps. “There were rules set and they’re pretty much followed,” Daggubati said. One of the reasons why the costs are in check, he believed, was that many Telugu stars also come from established production houses. “They understand production and that’s why it stayed in control.”

Tamil producer Archana Kalpathi, who has backed titles like Vijay's The Greatest of All Time, Bigil and Pradeep Ranganathan's Love Today and Dragon, said their industry hasn’t reached a crisis point yet, but the signs are unmistakable.

“We’re very clear that this is what we can afford. There is a lot of really good talent and that's how it's going to work from now on,” she said. The real escalation, she added, often comes from managers, not actors, who widen the communication gap and inflate expectations. “We want smooth shoots, we want everyone to be happy. But we can’t burn ourselves," she concluded.